TeamViewer is a global leader in remote access solutions. Founded in Germany in 2005, its software is now installed on 1.5 billion devices all over the world. The company’s 700 employees – who comprise 40 nationalities – work hard to help users easily overcome geographical limits. TeamViewer counts Philips, Avaya, and the French Space Agency (CNES) among its customers.

Their story

TeamViewer is growing quickly so it needed to ditch ad-hoc workflows

Here’s the thing about wind turbines: the computers that control them are often high up on the towering, stem-like structures that support their blades. So it’s hardly surprising to learn that wind farm technicians spend a lot of time climbing ladders. This is the kind of problem TeamViewer solves: with the market leader’s software, turbine workers can take control of the giant fans using a mobile device, remotely, from the ground. As a world leader in remote access and support, the German company offers a monitoring solution, a ticketing system, and online meeting capabilities, among other features.

You realize that a lot of time is devoted to development and new functionalities – new features are added every two weeks. Therefore, I am sure that we are fit for the future with Wrike.

Fabian Schenk

Marketing Project Manager

TeamViewer is growing fast. Since 2005, eight new offices have opened across Germany, the UK, Australia, Armenia, and the USA. In the early days, its marketing team worked on an ad-hoc basis, dealing with projects using emails, spreadsheets, and even committing some to memory. But with expansion came challenges: the same team was flooded with demands on their time as inboxes filled up with ever more complicated briefs. Something had to change. "We realized that we were at a point where it just didn’t work anymore without a project management tool," says Fabian Schenk, TeamViewer’s Marketing Project Manager.

The lack of transparency in our approval and review process and the growing number of projects required a project management tool that had a feature for proofing and approval. Thanks to Wrike, we were able to kill two birds with one stone.

Fabian Schenk

Marketing Project Manager

Their victory

Wrike makes sure everything the marketing team needs is in one place

Schenk looked into various solutions. Some things were certain, though: the new tool had to be simple and intuitive, and provide features that allowed it to operate as more than just project planning software. Above all, a must-have for the marketing team was a proofing and approval feature. They needed to ditch their system of emailing back and forth; a system that often resulted in miscommunication and lost information. "The lack of transparency in our approval and review process and the growing number of projects required a project management tool that had a feature for proofing and approval," Schenk says. "Thanks to Wrike, we were able to kill two birds with one stone."

After assessing a range of options, Schenk decided to go with the Enterprise version of Wrike because it provided a single sign-on functionality, and crucially, it complied with TeamViewer’s strict internal security policies. The team also decided to go with Wrike Proof add on.

TeamViewer’s marketing squad has clear priorities: lead generation and brand awareness. "Wrike helps us to map out the entire production process for our marketing campaigns from start to finish," Schenk explains, "for example, there's a template that includes all tasks that we need to create email campaigns." This stands in marked contrast to their old system: "Instead of one task we would have had ten emails, every third comment would have been another email," he says. "Wrike has definitely reduced our internal emails – and frustration."

Before Schenk rolled out Wrike for all marketing staff, he convened a small internal focus group to test how it might work, going forward. This team got busy brainstorming the kinds of deliverables they would need for typical campaigns: the number of emails that should be sent, for example, or if posters and advertisements might be needed. When these processes were mapped out, Wrike was deployed team‑wide.

After the roll out, some of the squad had reservations, though: they were nervous about moving to a whole new system. But they found Wrike extremely easy to use and TeamViewer provided internal training in order to make the transition as smooth as possible.

In addition, Wrike provides companies with deployment specialists to help with transitions like this. "I would recommend taking advantage of Wrike's deployment expertise," Schenk adds. "The support, the online help, and the direct contact with Wrike employees is just great."

The marketing team loves customising Wrike features. Right now, they are using request forms to update the TeamViewer website but they also plan to use them for localization management in the near future. This will allow the team to keep track of everything that needs to be translated. Schenk likes that the tool not only allows users to customize existing features, but that Wrike releases new features regularly.

"You realize that a lot of time is devoted to development and new functionalities – new features are added every two weeks. Therefore, I am sure that we are fit for the future with Wrike,” says Schenk.

Their superpowers

Timeline

With Wrike’s Timeline view, the entire planning process can be visualized and adjusted, It’s easy to see how tasks are related to one another. TeamViewer’s marketing squad finds this incredibly useful: "Depicting the dependencies and statuses gives you a good overview of what needs to be done and what's going to happen," says Schenk.

Comments and @mentions

The ability to comment on individual tasks and notify colleagues with @mentions makes communication easy, Schenk says. He especially likes Wrike’s email notifications: "No matter if a team member works in Outlook or in Wrike – they will see status updates immediately. This promotes knowledge management and transparency," he says. Wrike also provides Wrike Proof feature which allows @mentions to be submitted directly to image or video files.

Templates

Wrike’s template feature allows teams to set up frameworks so they don’t have to start tasks from scratch. "We use templates primarily for project-based tasks, such as email campaigns," Schenk explains. Templates are especially useful for frequent projects that are too complex to be represented by a customized workflow.